Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

These influences played merely upon the under-surfaces of an intelligence whose thoughts followed the steamer down the Chesapeake as certainly as the flock of gulls.... It was that quiet time in the morning, after the floors are washed. The day was bright, with just a touch of cold in the air.

... A drink improved him generally. He examined the string of horses again, and talked to the man behind. The man declared it was his law not to drink oftener than once in the half-hour, during the forenoon; he stated that it paid to exert this self-control, as his appetite was better and he was less liable to “slop over” in the afternoon. Morning was then informed that oysters were particularly good just now, and that a man with a weak stomach could live on oysters.... There was just one little flange of an oyster that was indigestible. The man knew this because drink makes one dainty about his eating, and one can tell what agrees with him or otherwise. Furthermore, one could detach the indigestible flange in one’s mouth before swallowing—anyone could with practice. The man glanced frequently at the clock.... Well, he would break over, just once, and make up later. A half hour was sometimes a considerable portage.... They became companionable.

Morning started back for New York at noon. The particular train he caught was one of the best of its kind. The buffet, the quality of service and patronage had a different, an intimate appeal to-day. He sat there until dark—in that sort of intensive thinking which seemed very measured and effective to Morning. His chief trend was a contemplation, of course, of the night before. Aspects appeared that did not obtrude at all with the woman by him. Considering the opportunity, he had kissed her very rarely, as he came to think of it....

His fellow-passengers let him alone. He reflected that he could always get along with the lower orders of men—with sailors, soldiers, bartenders; with the Jakes, Jethros, and Jerries of the world. Duke Fallows had remarked this.... Duke Fallows ... the old Liaoyang adventure came back more clearly than it had for months.... That was a big set of doings. Certainly there was a thrill about those days, when one stopped to think.

At dinner time, approaching the end of the journey, Morning met a pronounced disinclination to stay on the Jersey side. The little cabin on the hill was certainly not for this condition of mind. He had to stop and think that it was only yesterday noon when he left the cabin. A period of time that flies rapidly, appears strangely long when regarded from the moments of its closing. The period of the past thirty hours since he had left the hill was like a sea-voyage. The lights across the river had a surprising attraction. When he realized the old steam of alcohol, his mind glibly explained that it was merely an episode of a sick and overwrought body; that the real John Morning, of altruism and aspiration, was away at sea with the love-woman, much cherished, the very soul of him.

More than a half-year before he had fled to the country, weary to nausea of men in chairs and buffets. The animalism of it had utterly penetrated him at last; the Conrad study was but one of many revelations. He had hated the Boabdil; and hated more the processes of his own mind when alcohol impelled. Only yesterday morning he had hated the whole vanity of New York leisure, with the same freshness that had characterized his first month of cleanliness. Yet he found novelty in the present adventure; the prevailing illusion of which was that he was wrong yesterday rather than now. That night he sought his old haunts. There was a gladness about it.

“One mustn’t be too much alone,” he decided, “especially if he is to write.... I must have got cocky sitting there alone by the cabin-door.... These fellows aren’t so bad....”

Presently he was telling the old story of Liaoyang. That roused him a little and pulled upon mental fibers still lame.... Was he to be identified always with that?... A week later he was telling the story of breaking away from the Russians at Liaoyang and making the journey alone to Koupangtse. This was in a strangely quiet bar on Eighth Avenue, in the Forties. A peculiarity about this particular telling of the story was that he remembered the ferryman on the Hun—the one who had wakened the river-front as he led Eve down to drink—the ferryman who was a leper....

As days passed he went down deeper than ever before. “I must have had this coming——” he would say, and refused to cross the river to rest. There were moments when he felt too unutterably dirty to go to the cabin. One day, he kept saying, “I’m going to see this through.” And on another day he reflected continually (conscious of the cleverness of the thought) that this drink passage was like the journey to Koupangtse.... Then there was the occasion when it broke upon him suddenly that he was being avoided at the Boabdil. He never went back.... One morning he joined some sailors who had breezed in from afar. They brought him memories and parlances; their ways were his ways all that day, whose long drift finally brought them to Franey’s Lobelia, as tough and tight a little bar as you would ask any modern metropolis to furnish. The sailors were down and done-for now, but Morning stood by for the end, enjoying the place and the wide bleakness of it.... A slumming party came in about midnight—young men and women of richness and variety, trying to see bottom by looking straight down—as if one could see through such dirty water.

The city’s dregs about him—a fabric of idiocy and perversion and murder—did not look so fatuous nor wicked to Morning’s eye, as did this perfumed company. They thought they were seeing life, but, deeper than brain, they knew better; their laughter and their voices were off the key, because they were not being true to themselves. Franey’s regulars were glad for the extra drinks, but Morning had a fury. His shame for the party was akin to the shame he had held for Lowenkampf on the eve of battle long ago. He arose, short and flaming, yet conscious even in his rage of the brilliance of his idea.